Winfred Rembert

Winfred Rembert was born on November 22, 1945, in Americus, Georgia, and raised in nearby Cuthbert, Georgia, by his great-aunt Lillian Rembert, whom he called "Mama." He worked in the cotton fields from early childhood. As a teenager he became involved in the civil rights movement, and in 1965, at age 19, he was arrested after fleeing a demonstration. He survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement and was then incarcerated for roughly seven years, much of it spent on a prison chain gang. In prison he learned to read and write from other incarcerated men, and he learned to tool and dye leather, the technique that became the basis of his art.

After his release, Rembert settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and married Patsy Rembert, with whom he had eight children. He did not begin making art in earnest until the mid-1990s, encouraged by his wife, and from 1996 until his death he produced paintings carved and dyed into leather that depicted cotton picking, chain gangs, and everyday Black life in the segregated South. His work reached a national audience through a major exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery and through the 2011 documentary "All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert." He continued to exhibit and lecture in the years that followed.

His memoir, "Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South," was published by Bloomsbury in September 2021 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 2022. Rembert died in 2021 at his home in New Haven, Connecticut, at age 75.

Rembert's critical reputation rests on the directness with which his carved and dyed leather panels carry memory, labor, and racial violence into a narrative art tradition, with critics and curators frequently placing him alongside self-taught predecessors such as Horace Pippin, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. His standing grew steadily from his Yale University Art Gallery exhibition through museum surveys at the Danforth Art Museum, the Muskegon Museum of Art, and the Butler Institute of American Art, and it was cemented by the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, an unusual crossover of literary and art-world recognition for a self-taught artist. Museums have continued to acquire his work steadily since his death, and posthumous exhibitions, including at Hauser & Wirth, have reinforced the reading of his leather paintings as a firsthand visual record of the Jim Crow South rather than as folk-art curiosities.

Rembert's highest recorded auction prices are tied: "History of the Old South" and "Chain Gang," each sold for USD 282,900 at Brunk Auctions in Asheville, North Carolina, on September 30, 2021, in a sale of works from the Peter Tillou estate. Trade press described the result as setting an auction record for the artist. Away from the salesroom, gallery asking prices for his leather paintings have been reported in the range of roughly USD 90,000 to 400,000, though this range comes from a single trade report and has not been independently corroborated.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Winfred Rembert, and his estate's gallery representation is not fully confirmed in public sources. Adelson Galleries is cited as representing the artist, and Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Marguo have organized posthumous exhibitions that hold information relevant to provenance. His public auction record is thin: the two known top results occurred on the same day at the same house, so collectors should treat any single price as an early data point rather than an established trend line. The wide gap between reported gallery asking prices and the smaller number of public auction results is worth watching as more of his work reaches the secondary market.